


Masquerade

by holyfant



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-02
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-07 03:27:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1883487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holyfant/pseuds/holyfant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn't really about the act of taking off clothes. It's about the idea of clothes as barriers, and stripping people of them one by one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Masquerade

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nautilicious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nautilicious/gifts).



> written for nautilicious in the Holmestice summer round. Happy Holmestice, nautilicious! :-) Thanks to the lovely pasiphile for the beta <3

One evening, Kate is so clumsy with arousal when she slides her hands up Irene's legs that she accidentally catches a nail on one of Irene's delicate silk stockings. 

Irene glances down to where the tender fabric has split. When she moves her leg a little, the rip mercilessly opens further, down her thigh to her knee.

“Oh,” Kate says a bit stupidly. “I'm –” she begins to apologise, but Irene suddenly grabs her chin between her fingers and presses her thumb against Kate's mouth.

“No one gets to undress me but you,” Irene says, eyes glittering. “No one gets to say sorry that way.”

Kate swallows, and then opens her mouth slightly to let Irene's thumb rest against her teeth, the edges of her nail pressing into her upper lip.

*

Then again, it isn't really about the _act_ of taking off clothes, Kate thinks much later as she struggles to stop the sleeves of her blouse slipping down her elbows into the soapy dishwater. It's about the idea of clothes as barriers, and stripping people of them one by one.

She's not usually prone to philosophy, having to run a half-secret household on her own – but doing the dishes brings it out in her. The water is slippery and hot; the rim of the crystal glasses Irene likes are so thin and fragile she can hardly feel where they begin. She's broken more than one of them this way, not noticing when water became matter.

Stripping people, she thinks, and listens for the watery tinkle of the glasses as she carefully looks for them with her fingers. Stripping people and finding whatever it is they were trying to hide.

*

She's seven. Her mother is even more tired than usual, but there is an unfamiliar glimmer of happiness in her eyes as she turns the bundle of linen and baby to face Kate.

Kate frowns at the wrinkly, yellowish, flattened face. It doesn't see her: the eyes are closed. “I thought you said it was a boy. Why does it look like a girl?”

“You can't really tell this early, Katie,” her mother says, and angles the parcel of baby away again, uses a finger to touch the tip of its nose. It's really _small_. 

“Then how do you know?” Kate asks, curiosity roused, and moves closer to the bed.

Her mother laughs a little. “The doctor showed us.”

“But how does _he_ know?”

For the first time, her mother looks away from the new baby and at Kate. Her face is lined but soft. “He can just _tell_.”

“Oh,” Kate says. So that's how it works. She puts out a careful finger to check what her baby brother feels like. A little damp, but soft and a bit squishy. 

He opens his tiny mouth as though he wants to say something in response to her touch, but nothing comes out.

*

Irene dresses up for a living. Kate helps her with it.

Irene's body isn't just a _canvas_ , it's also a changing thing: while Kate had felt the undeniable press of her breasts the night before, and a rich roundedness of thighs and buttocks, today Irene is boyish and hard-edged. Even naked, she looks the part: it's the walk, Kate realises, and the awkward swinging of the arms that stops her hips from developing a smooth rhythm.

It's like... a step up from acting. Kate has known plenty of actors – she tried to be one, before she realised she's an out-of-the-spotlight kind of girl and that there is no shame in that at all – but none of them have ever inhibited as many bodies as Irene. Maybe she should worry about it more, about how Irene can flip through a repertoire of _physicalities_ just as easily as she can through her wardrobe.

Irene notices, when Kate thinks about these things. She changes posture, and when she sits down next to Kate at the mirror, she is herself again. (Kate forbids herself to doubt that. It wouldn't work and it has to work. Both of them need it to.) She is: a fullness of presence, a breathing, unfolding body. When Irene is relaxed, she slouches just a little. Kate thinks, for a second, that she can see the steady thudding of her pulse just above her collarbone.

“We should take a vacation somewhere,” Irene says.

“That would be nice,” Kate says, because it would.

“We could go somewhere we don't have to wear any clothes at all.” 

“I don't mind clothes.”

“No, you actually don't, do you?” Irene goes quiet for a moment, contemplating Kate. Her mouth is her own: unpainted, the upper lip a bit thin compared to the lower. 

It's not a real question, so Kate doesn't bother answering. She just smiles back at Irene and lets her hand trail over the row of lipsticks on the dresser – little soldiers in a little army. 

“He'll be here in a bit,” Kate finally says. “You should get started.”

Irene hums an affirmative, but her eyes are still fastened onto Kate's face. “Something nude,” she says.

Kate chooses a lipstick that is a soft shade of pink and starts to unscrew the top. 

“I do mean it, you know,” Irene says as Kate gently grips her chin and brings the lipstick to her mouth. Her naked body is just that: naked, body. Sometimes things aren't complicated. Kate feels a small frisson of shivery love at the way Irene looks at her: uncovered, wanting. The look of an open door just before it closes.

“I know,” she says. “I'll arrange something.”

*

At the theatre school Kate begins to learn that you can tell a lot from how people hold themselves, what their costumes are off-stage. She sees young and flamboyant gay men be more convincingly straight on stage than any straight man ever could, she sees ambitious and hard-minded gamines play gentle and naive farmer's flowers with a panache that no real country girl ever possessed. What matters is what people do when they step off the stage: do they go to wash their face first, or do they go outside for a fag still fully painted?

It's the most interesting thing she learned there.

What Irene teaches Kate, after she's accepted that trying to become an actor was just compensation for something else, is this: you can tell more about someone from how they open themselves up, the process of selecting which intimacy to reveal first. 

Irene had answered the door in the nude when Kate came for a job interview.

*

Zanzibar is sleeping under mosquito gauzes, dipping toes into shallow, warm ocean and seeing small things scurry away from your feet through the deforming lens of the water. They have a private bungalow and nobody ever disturbs them; the amount of money you pay is translated to the amount of peace you get, the amount of illusions of solitude. Irene wears loose clothing that goes see-through in the sea.

Irene doesn't tan, she just – reddens, and then pales again the next day. The temporary, rapidly cooled blushing of her body is something Kate quite likes, even though she still makes firm attempts at getting Irene to wear more sunscreen, because she knows about skin cancer, she's seen it, and it's... well.

Irene knows about this and generally doesn't argue. But even with the protective coating, there are always parts of her that Kate seems to have missed: the tender beginning of her scalp on her forehead, the shifting line of her bikini bottoms on her buttocks. Her toes. At night, when they sleep, Irene likes keep their bodies mostly separated, with small points of contact. Kate chooses to link herself to those places of Irene that are warm in the night, the points where the sun survives into the night. Hand on Irene's hot-glowing brow or shoulders, she sleeps far more deeply than she ever manages at home.

“I never want to go back to London,” Kate tells Irene one morning, and basks for a moment in the focused, searching look that Irene gives her as she works out whether Kate's being serious or not.

“Then we won't go,” she finally says and sighs.

*

Back at home, Kate slides her teeth over the flimsy material of Irene's stockings, up, up. (Of course she's still careful. She's good at her job, and she knows exactly how much this pair cost. But for a moment, she pretends to forget.) She lets her mouth slip over the edge of the lace border, worries her tongue at the small clasp of the garters and finally kisses Irene's skin.

“God, take them off already,” Irene says impatiently, and gently pushes at Kate with a foot.

It's not a game to Irene, _this_ isn't, and Kate knows that. She carefully undoes the garters and slowly peels off the stockings. They're nothing, they weigh nothing, they're nearly see-through. Yet without them, Kate can see the old scar just under Irene's knee and the bruise on her calf from when she walked into the coffee table.

“Who are you?” Kate whispers as she moves upward, slipping a leg between Irene's thighs and pressing close. Irene's body is like a spring relaxing.

“Mmm,” Irene says, and grasps at Kate's hair, collecting it between her fingers. “ _Irene_ ,” she says then.

“Good,” Kate replies quietly, and bends down to bite Irene's collarbone.


End file.
